Jaleh Afshar

How do design system teams prove their value? Finding hard metrics around the impact of design system teams has historically been a challenge. A year ago, I met the design system team at Eventbrite who could confidently say that they saved 534 days of engineering effort with their design system. Here's their calculation: Time spent to develop a component pre-design system - time spent to install the design system component = Time saved In order to extrapolate this number, though, you need to know how many times a component has been used. And, that used to require a savvy dev on the team to build something custom. That's no longer the case. We built something at zeroheight that will allow you to track component use in a single repo or across all of your repos. This should help teams show how valuable they are, plus do things like: see which components to prioritize based on use see which product teams are adopting As an added bonus, anyone using the new feature set can also monitor design system packages, allowing them to quickly see which teams are using outdated packages. On a personal note, I'm hoping with data like this, more teams can confidently quantify their impact. And along the way, we'll get better as design system practitioners at identifying the right things to work on. This new feature set is in beta and totally free. Even if you aren't using zeroheight to document your design system, you can use it. Takes like 15 minutes and you've got rich data. Here's the sign up:

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For anyone wanting to learn more about how we're working on AI as a design team here at Klaviyo, have a listen to this interview with Alexandra Holness

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In a competitive job market, leveling up your skills is crucial. I highly recommend this course at The Designership - it's a great and inexpensive way to enhance your design abilities. No kickbacks involved. Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/eGfV5kXC #Design #SkillDevelopment #CareerGrowth #productdesign

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So immensely proud of such an amazing group of people who've been working so hard on this big set of launches at Figma for #Config2024. ICYMI what we launched today, this blog post recap covers it well: https://lnkd.in/gX3KSWj3 I wanted to share a couple fun tweets from a few of the fantastic designers/leaders that worked on some of the things you may have seen in our keynote this morning. * This is not even close to an exhaustive list of those who worked on today's launches, but just a quick lil glimpse showcasing a few who happened to post about them today (also linkedin obscures the links for some reason, but they're all just fun behind the scenes tweets not shady sites I promise lol): Figma Slides - Keeyen Yeo: https://lnkd.in/gmxBH3wq - Mihika Kapoor: https://lnkd.in/gr54Upnu - Natasha T. / Ryan Reid: https://lnkd.in/gd-v9gE3 Redesigned Figma (UI3) - Ryhan Hassan: https://lnkd.in/g868XAze (can't wait to watch the behind the scenes talk with him and Joel Miller and KC Oh as well as Wayne Sun's when they come online later) - Tim Van Damme: https://lnkd.in/gQyvqzYr - Nikolas Klein: https://lnkd.in/ge_kKyvD Figma AI - Jordan Singer: https://lnkd.in/gXmFeXTM - Oscar Dumlao: https://lnkd.in/gkACVY_c - Marco Cornacchia: https://lnkd.in/gMt3BvVY - Vincent van der Meulen: https://lnkd.in/gCrHvcVu - Jediah Katz: https://lnkd.in/gMxEu7i8 - Giorgio Caviglia: https://lnkd.in/gCNVQrKC And more: - Jenny Wen (pages design by rocky chen ✌️): https://lnkd.in/gd_6RHAv - Soundharya Muthukrishnan: https://lnkd.in/gsnibt-j - Daniel Destefanis: https://lnkd.in/gu6mYBe6 - Becca Ramos: https://lnkd.in/gqM7RGKQ We hope you enjoy these updates, and excited to meet more of the amazing community at Config for Day 2 tomorrow! I'm particularly excited for Marcin Wichary's talk tomorrow at 3:40 https://lnkd.in/gvJNNerg

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#Config24. There's nothing quite like it when designers and makers gather to share, learn, and nerd out about our craft. Thank you Amperity for supporting our design team to take on this experience together at Figma's annual conference. There is so much to soak in, both from the presentations and chats across the community. Here are a few first takeaways: • Go faster with AI. From reducing tedium (auto-naming layers) to the emergent ability to turn flat UI into interactive prototypes with a click of a button. This philosophy is shaping the experience of designing in Figma. • There is a healthy and important debate in the design community about the implications of this AI-powered future. I love that it will lower the barrier for entry however agree with Jenny Arden: AI can get to good but as it can only remix what's been done before, it takes humans to get it to great. • Intentionality, creativity and craft matter even more. This theme came up throughout the two days. Tools should augment your process, not automate your favourite parts. • Shake the idea that difficult equals important. Simone Giertz overcame her performance anxiety by choosing enthusiasm as a driver for her work, resulting in a lot of fun and unexpected outcomes. • Aspire to be the team that sets the bar for quality. Peter Yang challenges PMs and people who care about product craft to choose quality and speed over scope. Cut features not quality corners to deliver beautiful products to customers, and quickly so you can learn. • How you structure your EPD teams will be reflected in your product. Resist symmetry. Nan Yu makes a great case for "heirloom tomato" teams that vary in size and shape in order to create an org chart you want to ship. • Figma redesign incoming. Figma's UI3 has been built on the core belief that way we design has evolved, requiring more immersion in the canvas. Minimizing UI aims to keep designers in flow, then make it easier to show and present work. On that... • Hello, Figma Slides. It just makes sense to show the work from the tool you built it in — and Slides (or Flides) will streamline this with speaker notes and quick layout features. • Does your design leave fingerprints? How might you weave traces of people, stories, acknowledge what you bring as a designer with a story of your own. Thank you Karla Mickens Cole and Nashilu Mouen from The Browser Company for this people-centered prompt.

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I’m going through an iterative design process with a XFN team right now. We know we’re solving the right problem because we get repeadted validation that the value prop aligns to user needs, but the experience doesn’t provide that outcome in an easy/intuitive way. So we iterate and iterate some more, each time finding ways to better achieve the outcomes we’re targeting. This process is messy. You learn that your initial assumption were off so you lean on failure to improve incrementally. It means as a designer you need to be vulnerable…that it’s not about you providing all “the answers” to your team in a beautifully packaged deck/speck. You need to show what’s “behind the curtain” and bring them along during your process. Show your thinking and learn to interpret feedback. Approach everything as a hypothesis, remain curious, explore and share.

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I'm trying to recruit some Alpha testers for a new AI product I'm building. The problem: Reviewing customer interviews and writing up findings takes too long. PMs & Designers usually don't have time to re-listen to research interviews, so they miss important insights. The solution: Upload your customer interviews to Decode, and let the AI do the work for you. In minutes, turn customer interviews into actionable insights. Decode will transcribe videos and use AI grounded in what the customer said; it will not provide insights unless they are accompanied by a customer quote. All insights are linked back to specific timestamps, so you can navigate to them with one click. I hope Decode can dramatically speed up user research, making it easy to extract unbiased, grounded insights. DM me if you'd like free access to the Alpha program or tag a researcher/designer/PM you know that might be interested in trying this out. Thank you! #buildinpublic #GenAI #buildinginpublic #UserExperience #productmanagement

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With Adobe, Figma, and others adjusting policies to support the training of LLMs (which you can totally opt out of btw), it's interesting to witness the design zeitgeist recognizing how business goals influence designers and the importance of data integrity in design. Taking it a step further by replacing "designer" with "human" allows us to connect with everyone we design products for. The practice of design operates at the intersection of business and human activity, a concept we are on the brink of internalizing at a profound level. Embed this and act accordingly! #businessvalue #dataintegrity #design #ux #productdesign #ai #llm #figma #adobe

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Design is more important than ever. In a world where AI will be able to output fully-functioning interfaces from a simple prompt, craft will differentiate great products from obvious solutions. I hope that the features launching today at #Config2024 will support that end-to-end process and unblock creativity so teams can go from idea to product. Let’s go through some of our launches: - New product: Figma Slides! You’ve been asking for speaker notes so we are giving you that and more. We’re gradually rolling this out so please try it and let us know what you think. - Figma AI: Our approach to bringing AI to the Figma editor is to address real pain points that stand in the way of your craft. Today, you’ll see a lot of AI features that do monotonous tasks for you and help you stay in the flow (Rename Layers and Make Prototype). Some are still MVP, but others are immediately useful. For example, Make Design helps you get to your first idea faster with a first draft and Visual Search finds similar designs already existing in your team. - UI3: We don’t take UI changes lightly. We put a lot of thought into making UI3 in Figma feel familiar while also reducing bloat and making it easier to use. We know that it may take some time to adjust to these changes, so we’re slowly rolling them out to users, starting today. You are welcome to turn this redesign off as we improve UI3 with your feedback. Eventually we will migrate all users to UI3. - Dev Mode: Since the launch, teams have marked over 4 million designs as ready for dev! We’re now introducing Ready for Dev View, Focus View, and new statuses. - Also available today, Code Connect is out of beta with new improvements like surfacing connected code snippets in the component playground, a new tool to streamline setup, and support for React, React Native, iOS, Android (with more to come!). Thank you to everyone who showed up for Config IRL and virtually! Lots more on what we’ve built and what we’re building here: https://lnkd.in/eRavMsr4

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I see the potential in AI tools, but let's hold up for a second. This recent mess with Figma's AI tool seemingly cloning Apple's Weather app is a wake-up call. It's a glaring example of what happens when we don't put proper guardrails in place. AI can be a game-changer, but not if it tramples on intellectual property and copyright. We need these tools to be smart enough to avoid ripping off existing work. It's not just about innovation; it's about respecting creativity and ownership. https://lnkd.in/gUHxJd_c

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Hearing about all the designers impacted by Intuit’s layoffs - many were friends, colleagues, solid leaders. All incredibly smart, hard working folks who made their customers happy by making Intuit’s products amazing. I’ve been on both sides of these decisions. If leaders are struggling with how to regroup with a smaller team tasked with doing more, happy to listen. If newly unemployed designers need some help rallying for the job hunt - HMU. Love you guys. When one door closes, many will open. 🤙 QUICK UPDATE: Several design leaders have reached out already because they are hiring and because Intuit has such a stellar reputation, externally, for great design talent. I am confident these folks will all have soft landings because they are so qualified and in demand. There’s particular interest for folks on the East Coast. HMU if this is you!

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Brilliant insight from Jemma Ahmed. Thank you ❤️ To me this insight resonates with and can be illuminated by Marxist political economy and a critical analysis of how capitalism sustains itself. In his 2010 book "The Enigma of Capitalism and the Crises of Capitalism" Geographer David Harvey describes the inability of capitalism to solve all of its inherent problems even as capital consistently and constantly seeks to overcome obstacles. Labor, of course, is one mechanism that capital manipulates in this endless search for ways to avert crises (real or imagined). What I see Jemma pointing to is capital's use of surplus value ("sufficient existing insight to carry them through a retraction period") that can be drawn upon to both ease the pressures of larger economic shifts and to discipline labor. In this case, "throwing inadvertent shade" at fellow workers testifies to the discipling power of capital and draws our attention away from the "actual problems at hand." What those actual problems are can be debated, but changes needed in the field of UXR are not paramount in comparison to many others that are inherent to the capitalist mode of production.

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This is such a powerful concept. Leveraging actual data from actual user research to build GPT-based "user impersonators" has the potential to accelerate creativity in the product team and to democratize knowledge of the user in a way that can help non-product people better understand their customers (especially important during onboarding). The interactivity, the ability to ask questions and then follow-ups, is the key. And, of course, this will drive the need for more actual user research, completing the virtuous cycle. #productmanagement #userresearch #productdesign #onboarding

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Check out this blog post from my teammate Brandon Lin about how we migrated our mobile rendering codebase to use Typescript without disrupting developers!

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If you're a designer and new to AI, I highly recommend watching this video (only 20 mins long if you watch at 1.5x speed), which provides a great primer for the topic of AI in UX. I find the content very well organized and easy to follow. It touches on the concept of AI at a super high level, various use cases, important considerations when designing with AI, and how Booking.com leverages AI to enhance their user experience.

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Probably the case outside of engineering as well. (Written) Communication is a hard skill.

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Unpacking Figma's success: Understanding the pivotal decisions from stealth mode to leveraging AI that redefined their market 👇 Jaryd Hermann, Author / Creator at HowTheyGrow.co, offers valuable insights into Figma’s strategic approach to building an enduring product, overcoming challenges, and leveraging emerging technologies like AI in “How Figma Grows: Design Beyond Designers”. Check out the key insights in the attached presentation 👇 ───── 👉 Follow me, Alexander Small, for tactics and strategies for building startups from industry-leading Founders, Operators and Investors

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AI is the buzzword of the day, but it's simply the next step in our technology evolution. Evolving generative AI interactions are repeating human-computer interaction history. Remember those green screens and books filled with computer prompts, or learning how to use a search engine? Perhaps you do, maybe you don't, but either way AI has modified the way we do this by using natural language! #AI #technologyevolution #naturalanguageprocessing

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